Eleventh Doctor

Twelfth Doctor

Quick rundown

The Target novelisations, the chronologically first books, are novelisations of existing Doctor Who stories. Back in the day they were the only way to revisit old stories and so they coloured fan opinion of the stories significantly - RTD mentioned somewhere that the fan conception of Gallifrey is based on the novelisation of The Deadly Assassin rather than on what we actually see in The Deadly Assassin, and other such things. They have a reputation for being churned out and stylistically bad, and some of them are, but others of them add interesting bits, or do things that couldn't happen on TV for whatever reason, and are really quite good (and whatever criticism Terrance Dicks gets for his formulism, you could use his novelisations to teach a primary school class on 'how to write opening paragraphs that suck the reader in').

The Virgin ranges - Virgin New Adventures and Virgin Missing Adventures - are the continuations of the series after it was cancelled. The New Adventures is the incumbent Seventh Doctor arc you probably hear about a lot - looms, Timewyrm, Bernice Summerfield, etcetera. The Missing Adventures are attempts to tell stories with Doctors preceding the current incumbent. They have fallen out of fashion a lot due to their Dark And Erotic Themes For Adult Fans, dated cyberpunk and obnoxious fanwank, but a lot of them are still seriously good. The New Adventures have a tight chronology, so start at the beginning, and the Missing Adventures are a lot looser and can be read out of order. After Virgin lost the license to do Doctor Who books, they made a series by the same writer with Bernice Summerfeld (a book-original companion) going on her own adventures, with the trademarked stuff filed off.

Short stories

The Short Trips and the Decalogs are short story collections containing all sorts of interesting things - there were three Short Trips books published by the BBC, and then Big Finish took over. (They no longer do books.) The 50th Anniversary Stories and the Telos Novellas are two short ranges with 'celebrity' authors writing stories for a selection of past Doctors - Telos concentrating on sci-fi writers and 50th Anniversary concentrating on popular British children's authors. (The 50th Anniversary ones were aimed at children, so if you want something that won't get gorier or sexier than the series itself it's a good place to start. Telos has Ben and Polly forcing hippies to vomit up evil LSD and 1960s racism and the Fourth Doctor having a mental breakdown, so...)